France, America, and the Revolution History Forgot
- Isabelle Karamooz
- 6 hours ago
- 5 min read
History is rarely erased in dramatic fashion. More often, it disappears quietly beneath layers of patriotic storytelling, selective memory, and national convenience. The American Revolution, perhaps more than any other founding myth in the modern Western world, has long occupied this delicate space between historical reality and carefully curated legend.
For generations, Americans have embraced the image of determined colonial patriots defeating the greatest empire on earth through courage, sacrifice, and sheer willpower alone. In France, meanwhile, the extraordinary role played by the kingdom of Louis XVI in the creation of the United States has often remained strangely understated, overshadowed by the violence and symbolism of the French Revolution that followed only a few years later.
Episode One, in the 13-part series of Retracing The Washington/ Rochambeau Revolutionary Route (from Newport, Rhode Island to Yorktown, Virginia)
For Robert Sherretta, this silence is not merely an academic oversight. It is the central mission of his work.
“We emphasize the word real,” Sherretta explains when discussing his nonprofit initiative, The Real American Revolution. “Because we do believe that there are certain misconceptions and myths about the American Revolution.”
A former banking executive turned historical researcher and documentary producer, Sherretta has spent years immersed in archives, military correspondence, financial records, and personal letters from the Revolutionary War era. What emerges from his research is not simply a reassessment of historical facts, but a profound reconsideration of how nations construct identity through memory.
According to Sherretta, both France and the United States gradually created incomplete versions of the same story. In America, patriotic pride elevated the mythology of self-reliance while minimizing foreign assistance. In France, the monarchy that made American independence materially possible was itself erased from the national narrative after 1789. “The very royal family that made this all possible for the United States to even exist as a nation,” he reflects, “was completely pushed aside by history, swept aside by your own revolution.” Yet Sherretta insists the scale of France’s involvement cannot be overstated. “The contribution that France made was enormous,” he says. “It cannot be overstated in any respect.”
What fascinates him most is not simply diplomacy, but the brutal material reality of the war itself. The romantic image of organized colonial armies marching confidently toward liberty, he argues, bears little resemblance to the historical record. Through Washington’s letters and firsthand accounts, Sherretta discovered an army plagued by hunger, desertion, inadequate weapons, and near hopelessness.
“We learned a cartoon history,” he says bluntly of his own American education.
Again and again, George Washington wrote desperate appeals to Congress warning that without substantial outside assistance, the revolutionary cause would collapse entirely. Long before Benjamin Franklin became the celebrated diplomatic figure in Paris, covert French support had already begun reshaping the war behind the scenes.
Sherretta points to the largely forgotten efforts of Silas Deane and Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, who secretly organized shipments of muskets, cannon, ammunition, and gunpowder to the colonies. The Americans, he explains, lacked not only resources but even the industrial capacity to sustain prolonged warfare. “The Americans didn’t know how to make gunpowder in any mass quantities,” Sherretta notes. “It was one of the great deficiencies they had in battling the British.”
In Sherretta’s interpretation, even pivotal moments such as the Battle of Saratoga cannot be understood solely as American victories. French weapons and supplies reached colonial troops at critical moments, allowing them to confront British General John Burgoyne’s forces in ways previously impossible. But the most striking contrast arrived later with the appearance of Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau and the French expeditionary army.
Sherretta describes the scene almost cinematically. When Washington’s exhausted men marched through Philadelphia, civilians saw what he calls “a ragtag group of young, underfed soldiers, many without shoes and socks.” Then came the French troops. “Immaculate white uniforms,” Sherretta recalls. “Very sturdy muskets, well-supplied wagons filled with supplies, and the difference was stark.”
The image reveals more than military disparity. It exposes two completely different capacities for war. Rochambeau did not simply arrive with soldiers. He arrived with artillery, engineers, naval coordination, blankets, tents, supply chains, discipline, and perhaps most importantly, credibility.
One of Sherretta’s favorite stories concerns wagons filled with French silver so heavy that one reportedly crashed through the floor of a barn where it had been stored overnight. Unlike the struggling Continental Army, the French could actually pay local farmers for food and livestock. “When the French army came through,” he explains, “the American farmers presented their livestock, presented their crops… because the French had hard currency and silver to spend.”
By comparison, starving American troops often survived through confiscation and desperate foraging. Yet Sherretta’s research ultimately moves beyond economics and military logistics into something far more human. At the center of his work lies the emotional relationship forged between French and American soldiers during the war itself.
Washington’s letters to Rochambeau reveal not merely diplomatic gratitude, but genuine admiration and affection. “Washington wrote the most warm, affectionate letters to Rochambeau,” Sherretta says, “thanking him for what to Washington was the saving grace to form our country.”
At night, the armies shared camps, meals, stories, and improvised gestures across language barriers. French soldiers, many themselves emerging from poverty in pre-revolutionary France, were astonished by the relative abundance of American farms. Americans, meanwhile, struggled to comprehend why thousands of Frenchmen had crossed an ocean to fight for a foreign cause. “I think the Americans had to be really struck by the fact that these Frenchmen got on ships, came across the seas, and made that long journey and commitment to land and help them,” Sherretta reflects.
And yet, despite this intimacy of sacrifice, memory faded quickly.
Sherretta believes the timing proved catastrophic for France’s own recognition. The enormous financial burden of supporting the American Revolution weakened the French treasury at the very moment the monarchy approached crisis. “The amounts of silver and funds necessary to purchase all these supplies for the French were enormous in nature,” he says. “It helped bankrupt the French treasury and helped lead to your own revolution.”
Even more remarkably, he argues that many financial records and obligations owed by the United States to France may have vanished amid the upheaval of the French Revolution itself. “Many of those IOUs were lost in the fires of the French Revolution,” he says.
This intertwining of gratitude, historical amnesia, and unfinished moral debt gives Sherretta’s work its philosophical depth. For him, the story of the Revolution is not simply about independence. It is about alliance, humility, and the dangerous illusion of national self-sufficiency. “Only fools believe that they can act alone as a nation without the help of others,” he says firmly.
Without France, he argues, Spain would likely never have entered the conflict. Without both France and Spain, the colonies could not have defeated Britain. Without allies, the United States itself may never have existed. “We are not here without the help of foreign friends,” Sherretta says. “And for that reason alone, we should always be humble and thankful.”
As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, Sherretta believes this lesson matters now more than ever. His reflections move well beyond the 18th century into the anxieties and fractures of the modern world. “If we forget the ability to cooperate and help each other,” he warns, “we’re doomed as a nation.”
Perhaps that is the true purpose behind his years of research.
Not simply correcting historical inaccuracies.Not merely restoring forgotten names.
But reminding modern democracies that no republic is born entirely alone, and none survives long without memory, humility, cooperation, and the courage to acknowledge the debts that shaped it.
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